Sam Leith: We must have an open inquiry into our torture role

Some of the debate on the torture of terror suspects can be dispatched pretty quickly. We know it was done. We know it was illegal. And we know that the people doing it knew it was illegal because they covered it up.

The defenders of the CIA, and of possible UK complicity in the torture of terror suspects, fall back on three arguments. 1) It wasn’t really torture. 2) Even if it was torture, it shouldn’t have been illegal anyway because... 3) Those people are barbarians, and if it saved just one life...

Well. 1) It was: you can call it Enhanced Interrogation all you like but the Geneva Convention uses the ordinary English word. 2) Shoulda woulda coulda: like it or not, it was illegal. 3) Really? This one again?

Unlike the pantywaists of the “human rights lobby”, these folk take a certain macho pride in living in the real world. So it’s weird, isn’t it, that the arguments they advance are so unfailingly hypothetical. Well yes, of course there wasn’t actually a ticking bomb, they will say as they revive a 50-year-old thought-experiment; and of course there has never in history been a documented instance where the ticking-bomb scenario actually presented itself. But if one ever does, boy oh boy would torture come in handy: best get practising just in case.

This is not to play the ball where it lies. Rather, it is to clamp your hands over your ears and insist that were we playing quidditch instead of golf you’d have scored a try.

The real world does enter into the story, though. Because while it may not be where the torture is justified, it’s certainly where the torture is committed. Committed, in this case, by a pair of Air Force retirees who billed the US taxpayer $81 million for their professional services despite neither one having “experience as an interrogator, specialised knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in terrorism or any relevant regional, cultural or linguistic expertise”. Who says Dick Cheney — lately seen explaining that a detainee having his lunch puréed and blown up his bum was a “medical” thing — doesn’t have a sense of humour?

It does matter that we don’t let this go. Bush’s USA forfeited any claim to international moral authority; so, if it abetted or encouraged torture, did Blair’s UK. That forfeiture can only be reversed if successor governments are seen to take the law seriously, which means prosecutions.

I don’t doubt Sir Malcolm Rifkind takes the law seriously; nor do I doubt his promise that the Intelligence and Security Committee, which he chairs, will investigate “without fear or favour”. But with its proceedings largely private, its witnesses voluntary and testimony not under oath the ISC’s work is done with one hand tied. Its Establishment aura, too, compromises it from a public-relations point of view: and it matters a lot how this looks.

A separate, judge-led inquiry with powers of subpoena would cost us. But with Russia, China and Saudi Arabia looking on it would cost us a lot more than just money to shrug and say that perhaps this stuff doesn’t matter after all.

What’s odd is the timing. The collection was published at the end of September. Running the serial in January, three and a half months late, either makes the BBC look rather dozy — or as if they thought it might make an easy publicity splash in the pre-Christmas papers.

No harm done either way. Those who enjoy being outraged will be outraged; those who fancy themselves to be cocking a snook at the bourgeoisie will pat themselves on the back. The old dance continues.

Good, anyway, to see the pictures. They are a sign that the goodwill arrangement between his parents and the media, whereby we refrain from papping and harassing the infant and are rewarded with the occasional nice image, is holding.

Much hilarity at the hack of computers at Sony Pictures that yields — inter alia — details of executive salaries, the twist in the new Bond movie and the disobliging views of senior honchos on Angelina Jolie’s professional comportment. It does occur to me, though, that if we’re going to be righteously angry about incursions on our private communications by Google, Facebook and GCHQ, it looks a little shabby to treat the same thing when it happens to large corporations as giggle-worthy gossip to be passed on indiscriminately. Either we’re serious about privacy or we’re not.